Stock Exchange for Governments? What an Idea!

"I propose the creation of a new stock market in the United States. It would include 50 individual securities, each representing one of the 50 states. People would be able to "bet" or "invest" in states on an exchange.

Such a visual, quantified representation would surely put some pressure on our elected officials to act more fiscally responsible.

If they didn't, they'd risk being ousted, just like a CEO of any major company. Or just like any one of the now "ex" European heads of state.

Doing so would allow us to invest in the performance of a state's internal and external representatives. These stocks would not represent the underlying value of a state, but rather, they would be "Sentiment Tracking Stocks," tied to the financial performance of each state."

Better Add An “F” to Europe’s Debt Contagion, published Tue, Nov 29th, 2011 by Karim Rahemtulla

What the Government Will Never Tell You About the Debt Crisis

"I have no illusions about the turmoil of a real government shut down. It's ugly. For some period of time, it would be hell for millions of people. I don't want that. I'm sure you don't, either. No one wants mass economic hardship. I'm fully aware we're talking about people's lives here…

But if the government shrinks 45% starting August 3 and remains permanently smaller, the hardship would be temporary. We'd come out the other side of it a better, stronger, wealthier, and maybe even less arrogant nation.

Simply reducing the deficit wouldn't mean you'd pay less in taxes – so it's not that we'd all have more money in our pockets starting August 3. It's that there'd be less government, which means less government meddling in the economy. There'd be fewer parasites and more potential producers. We'd be freer to create new wealth and grow new businesses. A little more freedom would go a long way.

It would be good to have more productive minds looking for ways to create new wealth with fewer government impediments to doing so. It's much better than having those same productive minds rotting behind government desks, meddling in other people's lives, and destroying wealth instead of creating it.

But I do think the debt ceiling will be raised by August 2. Among other reasons for this belief, there's something you'd learn in the ensuing crisis if the ceiling was not raised, something nobody wants you to learn…

You'd find out government is the problem not the solution, and that we'd all be better off with a lot less of it.

That's why Treasury Secretary Geithner says it would be a "catastrophe" not to raise the debt ceiling. It's why Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says it would be "calamitous." It's why Komrade Obama says it would be "financial Armageddon." They're all trying to scare you.

Everybody thinks people would starve without the big, strong government to feed them. It's not true. We'd be a more productive, dynamic, and wealthy society. You'd see this happen right before your eyes if a large portion of the government shut down permanently.

But nobody in government wants you to see that.

Our economy doesn't suffer from a lack of govern-
ment intervention. It suffers from too much government intervention. The solution to too
much government intervention in the economy isn't more government intervention. It's less government. That's what you'd get on August 3, without a higher debt ceiling.

Laying all my cards on the table, I freely admit that I relish the potential shutdown of huge swaths of our bloated, oppressive federal bureaucracy. And I relish the prospect of hundreds of thousands of government employees, people with perfectly productive minds, some of them quite brilliant, making the change from parasites to producers… though I realize it's unlikely to happen.

Imagine for a minute the unleashing of entrepreneurial energy in the wake of a shutdown of 45% of the federal government. The U.S. government is filled with intelligent, highly educated, highly trained people. Many are experienced leaders. Many are more than capable of positively heroic feats of entrepreneurship, feats we'll never witness if they don't leave their government jobs and get to work.

Frightened children like Obama, Bernanke, and Geithner see scary monsters everywhere. Adults with vision and experience see opportunities. I promise you those opportunities are real. They exist. If the government wakes up August 3 and can't pay 45% of its bills, it won't be long until many of those opportunities are seized and exploited, to the benefit of us all."

What the Government Will Never Tell You About the Debt Crisis, by Dan Ferris, editor, The 12% Letter,Saturday, July 23, 2011

Inflation Doesn’t Just Happen

In 2003 the renowned Swiss professor Peter Bernholz published a very practical book: Monetary Regimes and Inflation. Bernholz’s most important findings:

1. “The political system tends to favor an inflationary bias of currencies. All major inflations have been caused by princes or governments.”
Let me make this important finding even clearer: Politicians are printing money if they are allowed to do so. No wonder — the government is the main profiteer from inflationary episodes! Inflation is nothing less than tax hikes in disguise.

1. “All hyperinflations in history have occurred during the 20th century, that is in the presence of discretionary paper money regimes, with the exception of the hyperinflation during the French Revolution, when the French monetary regime, too, was based in a paper money system.” 
Given the abundance of hyperinflationary episodes — Bernholz discusses 29 of them — the still widespread belief in the advantage or even necessity of paper money being guarded by central bank bureaucrats is beyond insanity.

1. “Monetary regimes binding the hands of rulers, politicians and governments are a necessary condition for keeping inflation at bay.”
Okay, that’s how it should be. Unfortunately, in the U.S., in Europe and elsewhere there isn’t a strong enough public movement to stop the current reckless monetary and fiscal policy. Inflationists like Ben Bernanke are running amuck, without any opposition in sight! Therefore I have to conclude that “binding the hands” is next to impossible.

1. “Hyperinflations are always caused by public budget deficits which are largely financed by money creation.”
That’s an interesting finding, isn’t it? It makes it absolutely clear just how important fiscal policy is in the inflationary process. With budget deficits in the U.S., Japan, and most European countries totally out of control since the latest recession, this is a very strong argument for an inflationary endgame in the making. But this observation also brings up an important question: With budget deficits on the rise for many years, why hasn’t inflation become a major problem yet? There are two answers … First, we’ve already had severe inflation! During the late 1990s it came in the form of a global stock market bubble. And after that, as a real estate bubble. The second answer is taken from Bernholz’s book:

1. “A continuous flow of new money into the economy leads to inflation only after a more or less extended time, if the old money is also used abroad.”
Since the dollar and the euro are vastly used abroad, inflationary pressures have not yet come to fruition. But the course has clearly been set. Let me close this elaboration on inflation and government debt with one last quote: 

1. “A real budget deficit cannot be maintained permanently. The government must either reduce it or the inflating bad money will be substituted in time by the good money and the base of the inflation tax will be eroded.”

Claus Vogt, Money and Markets, Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 7:30 am

True American Health

We have the most expensive--not the best--health care in the world.  The World Health Organization rated the U.S. 37th in health outcomes in the world--on par with Serbia!  In the 2000 rankings, the U.S. was near the very bottom of the top 40 nations, below Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Dominica, and just above Slovenia, Cuba, and Croatia.  And it is worse today.

Andrew Weil, M.D., You Can't Afford To Get Sick, Plume Publishing, 2009

I can't help it...It's the truth!

"The U.S. government has never succeeded in collecting more than about 20% of GDP in taxes.... Our GDP is roughly $14 trillion today. So no matter how you organize the tax base, you end up with $2.8 trillion to spend. And you can't spend that much, because you've got interest payments and (gasp!) debt repayments to make.

Yes, that's right, America: You borrowed all this money, and our creditors actually expect to be repaid. Interest payments and principal reductions of our debt will have to come first and should total around $500 billion each year. If interest rates go up, we'll have to spend more than this. Sorry. That's the price we have to pay if we expect to maintain control of our economy and not allow our children to end up as house-boys and maids in Shanghai. That leaves us with roughly $2 trillion to spend.

Here are our current expenses: Medicare and Social Security are now spending $1.5 trillion and, if left alone, will quickly grow to far more than the entire tax base. The military spends over $700 billion (that we know of) each year. Domestic social programs (food stamps, Department of Education, etc.) cost $500 billion. Federal pensions cost more than $200 billion a year. So... we've got $2 trillion to spend... but our bills are running to $3 trillion per year, and they're scheduled to increase, substantially.

Thus, we will have to cut at least $1 trillion from the budget – immediately – and be prepared to continue cutting on discretionary spending and the military for at least the next decade. That will mean cutting about one out of every three dollars the government spends today. Unless we balance this budget, there's no longer any doubt our currency will be destroyed, our savings lost, and the assets of our country stripped by foreign creditors."

Porter Stansberry, The S&A Digest, April 22, 2011
  

Unsustainable!

"For the first time in modern history, the government is paying out more money, in cash, to citizens, than it is taking in taxes. We spent $2.3 trillion on direct benefits to taxpayers last year, while the government's total income was only $2.2 trillion. Roughly 60% of all Americans now receive some significant financial benefit from the government. Meanwhile, less than 50% of all people pay any federal income taxes. And roughly 10% of all taxpayers foot virtually all the significant income taxes levied."

Porter Stansberry, The S&A Digest, April 22, 2011

Gold, the New Currency

“Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what’s the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services,” Bass said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.”


~Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment’s board. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime-mortgage collapse.

Three Coins Versus The Counterfeiter

"At one time in American history, the benefits of sound money and the risks of easy credit were completely understood. It was during the founding of our country… just after the Constitution was ratified.

The Second Congress of the United States passed the Coinage Act of 1792. The act established the dollar as the currency of the United States and defined precisely what a dollar was: 24.1 grams of pure silver.

To ensure the quality of America's money, three coins were taken from every major batch minted. Each year on the last Monday in July, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the secretary of the Treasury, the secretary of State, and the attorney general witnessed these coins being assayed.

If the sample coins did not meet legal standards, the officers of the mint would be dismissed and the $10,000 surety bonds they posted would be seized. Further, if any officer of the mint was found guilty of embezzlement or of debasing the coins, the penalty was death.

Compare that system – where the most senior members of the federal government are in charge of maintaining the soundness of our money – with today's system. Under the current system, the federal government has become the biggest counterfeiter in the world.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has tripled the monetary base of the United States in only two years. The dollar lost 50% of its purchasing power under Alan Greenspan. And since the dollar was taken off of the gold standard in 1971, it's lost 90% of its purchasing power."

Porter Stansberry, A Precious Metals Chart the Government Won't Ever Show You, April 19, 2011 

Gravity Wave Measurement

I watched Head Games on the Science Channel about LIGO's inability to measure gravity waves using light, even for years.

It just seemed to me obvious.

What if light is not a valid measurement of gravity waves?

What if light were affected by gravity waves also so that no change would be noticed by an increase or decrease in distance measured by such light?

Why do you believe that light is not affected by gravity waves, and, therefore, making it not a valid measurement of gravity waves?

http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LIGO_web/other_gw/theorygroups.html

Retirement Diary

My intuition screams at me today.  I am not going to live past 70 years of age, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

My family history of grandfathers dying at 57 and 62 years of age, and a grandmother who apparently died around 30, leads me to believe that I will not live to 70.  My present rate of physical and mental decline corroborates this.

I further rationalize that living in a continually declining state depresses me.  It is better not to stick around too long.  Maybe I will make myself the public example of the desirability of ending one’s life at age 70, if it has not already ended, regardless of how many years of declining life may yet be had . . . for the sake of me and the sake of my society.

Society and the environment cannot afford to have nonproductive persons hanging around for decades.  Something has to give.  We, the old, have to give up at the appropriate time and make way for the young and new persons.

Having brought clarity to my life in this way, this liberates and motivates me.  First, I do not have to work for others.  I have just enough to make it to age 70 with what I have earned and received fortuitously.  Second, I can get selfish and do what I want to do, since I do not have indefinite periods of time remaining.  There is my book, my website, my other business schemes and projects.  Who knows, maybe if I do what I want to do, I will end up making a lot more money in spite of not working.


 

Maybe we should love global warming...

We seem to have waited until the precise time that the Earth will be cooling down for 25 years to spend billions of dollars to take the very compounds out of the atmosphere that we need to stay warmer.

We humans learn what is going on after it is already changing.

Beality

Cut government spending or shut it down and go home!

Right now, Congress is at an impasse over $60 billion in "cuts" to an already bloated budget that will saddle our children with more than $1.6 trillion in additional debt this year alone.

But the fact is, these "cuts" represent just 1.6% of this year's federal budget which has skyrocketed 10.5% since last year and 40% in just four years!

These miniscule "cuts" would be like the average American family ONLY adding about $49,000 in unpaid credit card debt this year instead of $51,000 and then bragging about "cutting" spending!

Penny Nance, Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee

Keep Your "Junk Gold" Dry

"Keep your premium quality gold coins as investments. But when the dollar finally collapses and everything hits the fan, scrap gold will appreciate much more. So don't send your unwanted jewelry and trinkets to outfits like "Cash4Gold." Instead, bundle them up and toss them into your survival kit, next to the packs of cigarettes and bottles of booze. They'll come in handy down the road."

Hector is an economist and a philosophy professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Jeff Clark from The Growth Stock Wire 

More Taxes is not the Answer

If we doubled today's tax revenue, we'd still have a deficit. Half of U.S. citizens pay zero taxes. The half that pays would leave if you double its taxes.

Dan Ferris and Sean Goldsmith from the S & A Digest

A Sign of the Times...Declining Currencies...

How has it come to be that a copper penny (95% copper) is worth more dead than alive ($0.0284119 vs. $0.01)?

Beality

Use It or Lose It...

“Use it or lose it” … BUT … “Abuse it and lose it.”

Beality

Best Criminals: The Federal Reserve Board

"The best criminals convince the world that they don't exist.

The Federal Reserve has done the same thing with its paper dollar.  The best counterfeiters convinced the world there's no real money.

The world used gold as its monetary foundation for at least 4,000 years.  Only since 1971 has the world's reserve currency had no connection to gold.  And yet, only 40 years later, it seems as though most people have forgotten gold is the only real money.

We think this is the greatest financial crime in human history. The U.S. government convinced the world gold didn't matter, that its paper (which it can legally print) is better than gold.  It  convinced all of its creditors that counterfeiting was better than sound money.

What do you think is going to happen when our creditors wake up and realize how they've been duped?  One thing is certain; they won't trust us again.  And they won't buy our bonds."

Porter Stansberry, February 2011

New Stuff...Old Stuff...

New stuff keeps appearing...old stuff keeps disappearing...

Beality

Before You Destroy America...

Whether you are Islamic, American, Hacker, Chinese, Criminal, Russian, Greedy, Alien ...Whatever ... before you destroy America, think about where you might otherwise find the following items invented in American and what even better items could follow them:

Internet, Global Positioning System (GPS), bubblegum, sewing machines, automatic transmissions, autopilots, hypertext (HTML...),electric guitars, lasers, photographic  film, credit cards, jeans, barcodes, escalators, liquid crystal displays (LCD), microprocessors, anesthesia, Facebook, digital cameras, integrated circuits, nylon, QWERTY, flowcharts, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), cash registers, phonographs, faxes, personal computers, supermarkets, Youtube, microwave ovens, transistors, bottle caps, Teflon, airplanes, masking tape, direct current (DC), televisions, Google, lightning rods, suspension bridges, mobile phones, fire hydrants, solar cells, computer mouses, typewriters, wrenches, wireless local area networks (WLAN), dental floss, Universal Product Code (UPC), email, mail order, radiocarbon dating, baseball, industrial robots, light emitting diodes (LED), rotary printing presses, swim fins, refrigeration, polio vaccine, oral contraceptive pills, Twitter, washing machines, safety pins, radios (even before Marconi!), liquid crystal displays (LCD), vulcanized rubber, burglar alarms, electric motors, eBay, skyscrapers, drinking straws, zippers, tractors, dissolvable pills, the assembly line, radio direction finders, hearing aids, thermostats, hearing aids, bulldozers, hydraulic brakes, digital video recorders (DVR), sunglasses, remote controls, digital computers and computer programming  languages, Skype, electric fans, microphones (carbon), pin tumbler locks (modern), frequency modulation radios (FM), wetsuits, plasma displays, garbage disposals, Richter Magnitude Scale, cable televisions, hard disk drives, radio carbon dating, xerography, smoke detectors, radio telescopes, videogames, lasers, compact disks (CDs), spreadsheets (electronic), laser printers, acoustic suspension speakers, carbon fiber, voicemails, cordless telephones, vacuum cleaners, Flash programming, videophones, and a billion other things that you  rely on and don’t even think about.

Beality

Bullies

The bullies of the world seem to be winning...again.

Beality

A Special Moment

“It is a special moment when a person stops living in defense of himself, stops getting even. He quits calculating and maneuvering; he just starts living. He doesn't stop listening, he just listens better. He doesn't throw away his education; he just finds what works for him and does it.  He doesn't stop caring for others, he just finds his love is itself reward enough, acknowledged or not. He doesn't stop reaching, he just grows what he knows, and passionately seeks for more. He doesn't cut himself off from others, but he is delivered from a need to always seek their approval. He doesn't pretend he has no fear, he just learns to walk with inward peace.” Richard A. Nelson?

I create opportunities.

To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.

~Bruce Lee

Knowledge is power, but character, respect.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

~Bruce Lee

Stop Helping Us Federal Reserve! Go Away...

Beality